A Castaway’s Treasure Chest
With my scant experience of television, I could not have imagined that one day I would be right in the thick of it; living in the heart of a one-of-a-kind media phenomenon – Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera was born at a time when the global community had started to embrace human rapprochement. Al Jazeera soon took the lead, not because of its technical innovation, but because of its professional demeanour in handling news stories, chiefly the political ones. From the beginning, it parted ways from the mainstream media, which remained - till this day - in the shackles of state authority. Like a castaway returning to civilization, I joined Al Jazeera in 1997. It was the beginning of a new quest for knowledge; for the truth. Like no other Arab media outlet, Al Jazeera adopted the charter of integrity and objectivity; closer to Western media such as the BBC. What made Al Jazeera stand out was the space it gave to ‘the counter opinion’ within Arab political circles, which was deemed an evil as sinful as blasphemy. Bold in content, but not daring enough in narrative, Al Jazeera’s early wording of a news story stopped at the image. Like the returning castaway, I kept watching from a distance; taming my pen to write to the image, which speaks volumes. It is said that an image speaks a thousand words. To me, an image speaks most of, but not the
Television carries powerful images, capable of not only conveying messages, but also of misleading by misrepresenting facts. As our world has become a tangled web of visual effects, television has had a heavy sway over our thinking and perception. It is a double-edged sword. At that time, everything was malleable in the iron fist of the state, which tightened its grip on the media: telling its people what it wanted to and denying them what it felt would defile their ‘political innocence’.
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